New guy, a few initial questions

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repo

Newbie
Original poster
Apr 23, 2016
3
10
Hi everyone, I just joined and have been reading on some of your builds, I can see myself spending a lot of time here, lol.

A little about my joining; I live in northern British Columbia, Canada. There isn't much in the way of smoking up here. Only a couple people have larger units available to hire. I'm considering building something to use for family gatherings, etc. These reverse flow builds look interesting to me. I just wanted a few opinions from you experts, before I spend too much time researching.

What I need is a unit that can hold roughly 200 pounds of pork and/or brisket at once. And it would be a trailer type unit.

I like the round pipe style builds with the attached fire boxes. Problem I might see is that we don't have the nice flavoured hard woods that you guys have in the south.

Can I use regular wood (pine) and add flavoured hard wood chunks? (I can buy these in bags)

Can charcoal be used in the fire boxes? Or would that be a different design?

Roughly how long and diameter of a pipe would I need to hold 200 pounds of meat?


I know these questions have probably been asked several times, but I just want an initial idea of what type of unit I would need to build, so I can begin the bulk of my research on the right style for my needs .

Thanks in advance!
 
Hi Repo,

Just my two cents worth as I'm relatively new myself and have only been smoking for around 2 years on a small scale. As far as woods go I have been told to steer clear of Pine wood.

Aside from making turpentine (solvent) out of some pine species I have also been told it creates creosote when it burns. Not something you want on your food.

As for charcoal, I have always used that with hard wood chunks as its mostly what's available here in Australia. I'm not sure how it would go on a larger rig however. I do notice that a lot of guys use a bed of charcoal simply to get things going and then chuck their splits on top.

Hopefully someone more experienced will lend a hand to your sizing questions. Good luck with your adventure!

Bazza
 
So i guess I need to know if anyone here uses or has tried using charcoal in the fire box instead of wood? Would the size of the fire box change for charcoal use?
 
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